Haddon, Mark: *1962
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 2003 - Information about the Book
- General Information
- The novel is about family, honesty, trust, and braving the unknown.
- Information from Wikipedia
- Facts
- "The Curious Incident" won the Whitbread Book Award for Best Novel (now Costa-Book-Award), the Book of the Year 2003 award of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.
- Commentary
Haddon, who has worked with autistic children, brilliantly imagines both the capacities and the limitations of autistic subjectivity. Because Christopher is literal and unselective in his observation of detail, the reader is given a precise and vivid view of his world. We are easily able to make the connections that Christopher does not see, but what he does see also gives us a new view of how those automatic connections may lead to inaccurate preconceptions. Fascinatingly, one who rejects fiction turns out to be an astonishingly good storyteller, even though we are ironically, saddeningly, aware that the story we read between the lines is not the same as the one that Christopher experiences.
The result is an illuminating and moving, and often very funny, study of perception and behavior. In the differences between Christopher's view of the world and our own, we learn a great deal about the capacities and limitations of the "normal" human mind, and about the ways in which the human habit of narrating frequently relies on the excision of parts of reality.
Belling, Catherine
Excerpted, with permission, from the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database at New York University School of Medicine, © New York University. - On the origins of "The Curious Incident"
- Three of the key themes
- Themes by Ashley Sadler
- Reviews
- by William Schofield, who has Asperger's syndrome. "This book is a good murder mystery story but a better description of how the mind of a different person with some kind of special need looks upon how things work and come about." The Guardian; January 29, 2004
- Review: "This is one of the most original and thought provoking books I have read in the last year." The Guardian; June 13, 2016
- Articles
- Mark Haddon's Curious Incident in the Neurological Spectrum. "Haddon shows in great detail Christopher's difficulties in social interactions." James Berger; Hofstra University
- Making sense of an inscrutable world. KCRW Radio, Santa Monica CA. August 08, 2017
- Author
- Audio (6:14)
Talk with Mark Haddon about the novel. NPR Radio; October 12, 2003 - The Curiously Irresistible Literary Debut of Mark Haddon. Dave, Powells; October 10, 2006
- Audio (6:14)